Review: When only Hitler could kill Hitler

Review of: The Plots Against Hitler

Author: Danny Orbach

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Grade: A

Source: Dallas Public Library

Considering that, according to Wikipedia, at least 42 assassination plots against Adolf Hitler have been documented – and who knows how many remain undocumented – why didn’t any of them succeed? Historian Danny Orbach attempts to answer that question – and debunk myths surrounding the most famous attempt, Operation Valkyrie, with his well-researched 2016 volume, The Plots Against Hitler. 

With a single notable exception, Orbach’s narrative concentrates on the resistance effort of the German military toward Hitler, and examines three key timelines of that resistance, from 1938 to 1944. He also asks – and attempts to answer – what motives persuaded these conspirators to overcome their own cultural and moral qualms about the killing of a leader to whom many of them had sworn personal allegiance.

Some of their motives, such as a hope of securing favorable peace terms with the Allies, no longer strike modern readers as morally acceptable, Orbach notes. Were patriotism and morality synonymous? More to the point for 21^st century readers, can the two motives still be equated? And how are we to make moral judgments today about conspirators as flawed as those Orbach details – sometimes womanizers, anti-Semites, at best “antidemocratic reactionaries” in the words of another writer, at worst, active participants in mass murder? What kind of morality would enable even such a vehement anti-Nazi as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, to join Germany’s military intelligence organization? Should even those who attempted to stop Hitler tarred with the same guilt as their target?

“(T)he story of the German resistance has a crucial moral component. After all, the Nazi era is still viewed around the world, and most of all in Germany itself, through the lens of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and the burden of National Socialist crimes. . . (but) gradually, I came to believe that one must transcend the current moralistic debate, redraw its terms, and reframe it altogether,” Orbach states.

Lest readers fear being overwhelmed by moralistic arguments, the book, even knowing how the story ends, reads like a thriller, with such elements as “nocturnal meetings in frozen fields; the elaborate drama of military conspiracies; bombs hidden in briefcases and liqueur bottles; and the dramatic day of July 20, 1944, with its abortive assassination and final, desperate attempt at a coup d’état.”

And often it reads like a tragi-comedy of errors. A bomb hidden in a bottle smuggled aboard Hitler’s plane inexplicably fails to explode. Hitler’s penchant for altering his schedule without notice foils still other plots. And all too often, it seems that the sheer multitude of conspiring assassins, although with their conflicting motives and agendas collide. 

One of the most nearly successful assassination attempts was the simplest – the lone-wolf effort of barely-educated carpenter turned watchmaker Georg Elser, whose 1939 bomb in a Munich beer hall missed Hitler but killed eight others. (Captured soon afterward and ultimately executed, Elser was reportedly devastated by the death of the innocent bystanders.)

So, what was the point of all the conspiratorial misfires, most of them resulting in little more than the gruesome deaths of the conspirators? Yes, some of their attempts saved hundreds of Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps, and may have limited the numbers of Poles, Soviets, and other Eastern Europeans massacred. But ultimately, millions more died. World War II was not shortened, hundreds of thousands of Germans, both soldiers and civilians, died. In the end, following Hitler’s own suicide, Germany as the conspirators knew it, disappeared. Were the conspirators heroes or the ultimate failures?

“Terms like heroes and heroism tend to make contemporary historians suspicious,” Orbach writes. “(But) once we have understood that (heroes’) armor is not shining but rather tarnished and scratched, we can see ‘heroes’ for what they are in the real world: people able, perhaps only briefly, to transcend ideology and selfishness and even existential dangers for the sake of a greater good.” 

And what would we do if we found ourselves in similar circumstances, Orbach asks. “If these questions make you ponder, then I have done the job I set out to do.”